LI    i<ARY 


UN! 

CA     1FORNIA 
SANTA  CRUZ 


SHORT  STUDIES 


AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 


BY 

THOMAS  WENTWORTH  HIGGINSON. 


BOSTON: 
LEE    AND    SHEPARD,   PUBLISHERS. 

NEW  YORK: 

CHARLES    T.   DILLINGHAM. 
1880.     - 


COPYRIGHT,  1879, 
BY  T.  W.  HIGGINSON. 


Ail  rights  reserved. 


95 


PREFACE. 


THESE  brief  papers  were  originally  published  in 
"The  Literary  World"  (Boston),  and  are  here 
reprinted  in  a  revised  form,  with  some  additions. 

CAMBRIDGE,  M ASS.,  Dec.  i,  1879. 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS. 


I.  HAWTHORNE 3 

II.  POE ,       .       .12 

IIL  THOREAU 22 

IV.  HOWELLS 32 

V.  HELEN  JACKSON 40 

VL  HENRY  JAMES,  JR 51 


SHORT  STUDIES 

OF 

AMERICAN    AUTHORS. 


HAWTHORNE. 

I  DO  not  know  when  I  have  been  more  surprised 
than  on  being  asked,  the  other  day,  whether 
Hawthorne  was  not  physically  very  small.  It 
seemed  at  the  moment  utterly  unconceivable  that 
he  should  have  been  any  thing  less  than  the  sombre 
and  commanding  personage  he  was.  Ellery  Chan- 
ning  well  describes  him  as  a 

"  Tall,  compacted  figure,  ably  strung, 
To  urge  the  Indian  chase,  or  point  the  way." 

One  can  imagine  any  amount  of  positive  energy 
—  that  of  Napoleon  Bonaparte,  for  instance  —  as 
included  within  a  small  physical  frame.  But  the 
self-contained  purpose  of  Hawthorne,  the  large 
resources,  the  waiting  power,  —  these  seem  to  the 
imagination  to  imply  an  ample  basis  of  physical 
life ;  and  certainly  his  stately  and  noble  port  is 

3 


4    SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

inseparable,  in  my  memory,  from  these  charac- 
teristics. 

Vivid  as  this  impression  is,  I  yet  saw  him  but 
twice,  and  never  spoke  to  him.  I  first  met  him  on 
a  summer  morning,  in  Concord,  as  he  was  walking 
along  the  road  near  the  Old  Manse,  with  his  wife 
by  his  side,  and  a  noble-looking  baby-boy  in  a 
little  wagon  which  the  father  was  pushing.  I  re- 
member him  as  tall,  firm,  and  strong  in  bearing ; 
his  wife  looked  pensive  and  dreamy,  as  she  indeed 
was,  then  and  always ;  the  child  was  Julian,  then 
known  among  the  neighbors  as  "  the  Prince.'* 
When  I  passed,  Hawthorne  lifted  upon  me  his 
great  gray  eyes,  with  a  look  too  keen  to  seem  in- 
different, too  shy  to  be  sympathetic  —  and  that  was 
all.  But  it  comes  back  to  memory  like  that  one 
glimpse  of  Shelley  which  Browning  describes,  and 
which  he  likens  to  the  day  when  he  found  an 
eagle's  feather. 

Again  I  met  Hawthorne  at  one  of  the  sessions 
of  a  short-lived  literary  club ;  and  I  recall  the 
imperturbable  dignity  and  patience  with  which  he 
sat  through  a  vexatious  discussion,  whose  details 
seemed  as  much  dwarfed  by  his  presence  as  if  he 
had  been  a  statue  of  Olympian  Zeus.  After  his 
death  I  had  a  brief  but  intimate  acquaintance  with 
that  rare  person,  Mrs.  Hawthorne ;  and  with  one 


HAWTHORNE.  5 

still  more  finely  organized,  and  born  to  a  destiny 
of  sadness,  —  their  elder  daughter.  I  have  staid 
at  "  The  Wayside,"  occupying  a  room  in  the  small 
tower  built  by  Hawthorne,  and  containing  his  lofty 
and  then  deserted  study,  which  still  bore  upon  its 
wall  the  Tennysonian  motto,  "  There  is  no  joy  but 
calm,"  —  this  having  been  inscribed,  however,  not 
by  himself,  but  by  his  son.  It  is  not  my  purpose 
to  dwell  upon  the  facts  of  private  life ;  and  these 
circumstances  are  mentioned  only  because  it  is  well 
to  know  at  what  angle  of  incidence  any  critic  has 
been  touched  by  the  personality  of  a  great  author. 

Perhaps  it  always  appears  to  men,  as  they  grow 
older,  that  there  was  rather  more  of  positive  force 
and  vitality  in  their  own  generation  and  among 
their  immediate  predecessors,  than  among  those 
just  coming  on  the  stage.  This  may  be  the  reason 
why  there  seems  to  me  a  perpetual  sense  of  grasp 
and  vigor  in  Hawthorne's  most  delicate  sketches ; 
while  much  of  the  most  graceful  writing  jiow  done 
in  America  makes  no  such  impression,  but  either 
seems  like  dainty  confectionery,  or  like  carving 
minute  heads  on  cherry-stones.  In  England  the 
tendency  is  just  now  to  the  opposite  fault,  —  to  a 
distrust  of  all  nice  attention  to  form  in  writing,  as 
being  necessarily  a  weakness.  Hawthorne  happily 
escaped  both  these  dangerous  alternatives;  and, 


6         SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

indeed,  it  is  hard  to  see  that  his  genius  was  much 
affected  by  his  surroundings,  after  all.  He  had,  to 
be  sure,  the  conscientious  fidelity  of  Puritanism  in 
his  veins,  a  thing  equally  important  for  literature 
and  for  life :  without  it  he  might  have  lavished 
and  wasted  himself  like  Poe.  He  had  what  Em- 
erson once  described  as  "the  still  living  merit 
of  the  oldest  New-England  families ;  " 1  he  had 
moreover  the  unexhausted  wealth  of  the  Puritan 
traditions,  —  a  wealth  to  which  only  he  and  Whit- 
tier  have  as  yet  done  any  justice.  The  value  of 
the  material  to  be  found  in  contemporary  Ameri- 
can life  he  never  fully  recognized  ;  but  he  was  the 
first  person  to  see  that  we  really  have,  for  romantic 
purposes,  a  past ;  two  hundred  years  being  really 
quite  enough  to  constitute  antiquity.  This  was  what 
his  "  environment  "  gave  him,  and  this  was  much. 

But,  after  all,  his  artistic  standard  was  his  own  : 
there  was  nobody  except  Irving  to  teach  him  any 
thing  in  that  way ;  and  Irving's  work  lay  rather  on 
the  surface,  and  could  be  no  model  for  Hawthorne's. 
Yet  from  the  time  when  the  latter  began  to  write 
for  "  The  Token,"  at  twenty-three,  his  powers  of 
execution,  as  of  thought,  appear  to  have  been  full- 
grown.  The  quiet  ease  is  there,  the  pellucid  lan- 
guage, the  haunting  quality  :  these  gifts  were  born 

1  "  The  Dial,"  iii.,  101. 


HAWTHORNE.  7 

in  him  ;  we  cannot  trace  them  back  to  any  period 
of  formation.  And  when  we  consider  the  degree 
to  which  they  were  developed,  how  utterly  unfilled 
remains  his  peculiar  throne ;  how  powerless  would 
be  the  accumulated  literary  forces  of  London,  for 
instance,  at  this  day,  to  produce  a  single  page  that 
could  possibly  be  taken  for  Hawthorne's,  —  we  see 
that  there  must,  after  all,  be  such  a  thing  as  literary 
art,  and  that  he  must  represent  one  of  the  very 
highest  types  of  artist. 

Through  Hawthorne's  journals  we  trace  the  men- 
tal impulses  by  which  he  first  obtained  his  themes. 
Then  in  his  unfinished  "  Septimius  Felton,"  —  for- 
tunately unfinished  for  this  purpose,  —  we  see  his 
plastic  imagination  at  work  in  shaping  the  romance  ; 
we  watch  him  trying  one  mode  of  treatment,  then 
modifying  it  by  another;  always  aiming  at  the 
main  point,  but  sometimes  pausing  to  elaborate  the 
details,  and  at  other  times  dismissing  them  to  be 
worked  out  at  leisure.  There  hangs  before  me,  as 
I  write,  a  photograph  of  one  of  Raphael's  rough 
sketches,  drawn  on  the  back  of  a  letter :  there  is 
a  group  of  heads,  then  another  group  on  a  different 
scale ;  you  follow  the  shifting  mood  of  the  artist's 
mind  ;  and  so  it  is  in  reading  "  Septimius  Felton." 
In  all  Hawthorne's  completed  works,  the  pencilling 
is  rubbed  out,  and  every  trace  of  the  preliminary 
labor  nas  disappeared. 


8         SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

One  of  the  most  characteristic  of  Hawthorne's 
literary  methods  is  his  habitual  use  of  guarded 
under-statements  and  veiled  hints.  It  is  not  a  sign 
of  weakness,  but  of  conscious  strength,  when  he  sur- 
rounds each  delineation  with  a  sort  of  penumbra, 
takes  you  into  his  counsels,  offers  hypotheses,  as, 
"  May  it  not  have  been?  "  or,  "  Shall  we  not  rather 
say?"  and  sometimes,  like  a  conjurer,  urges  par- 
ticularly upon  you  the  card  he  does  not  intend  you 
to  accept.  He  seems  not  quite  to  know  whether 
Arthur  Dimmesdale  really  had  a  fiery  scar  on  his 
breast,  or  what  finally  became  of  Miriam  and  her 
lover.  He  will  gladly  share  with  you  any  informa- 
tion he  possesses,  and,  indeed,  has  several  valuable 
hints  to  offer ;  but  that  is  all.  The  result  is,  that 
you  place  yourself  by  his  side  to  look  with  him  at 
his  characters,  and  gradually  share  with  him  the 
conviction  that  they  must  be  real.  Then,  when  he 
has  you  thus  in  possession,  he  calls  your  attention 
to  the  profound  ethics  involved  in  the  tale,  and  yet 
does  it  so  gently  that  you  never  think  of  the  moral 
as  being  obtrusive. 

All  this  involved  a  trait  which  was  always  su- 
preme in  him,  —  a  marvellous  self-control.  He 
had  by  nature  that  gift  which  the  musical  com- 
poser Jomelli  went  to  a  teacher  to  seek,  —  "  the  art 
of  not  being  embarrassed  by  his  own  ideas."  Mrs. 


HAWTHORNE.  9 

Hawthorne  told  me  that  her  husband  grappled  alone 
all  winter  witli  "  The  Scarlet  Letter,"  and  came  daily 
from  his  study  with  a  knot  in  his  forehead ;  and  yet 
his  self-mastery  was  so  complete  that  every  sentence 
would  seem  to  have  crystallized  in  an  atmosphere 
of  perfect  calm.  We  see  the  value  of  this  element 
in  his  literary  execution,  when  we  turn  from  it  to 
that  of  an  author  so  great  as  Lowell,  for  instance, 
and  see  him  often  entangled  and  weighed  down  by 
his  own  rich  thoughts,  his  style  being  overcrowded 
by  the  very  wealth  it  bears.  Hawthorne  never 
needed  Italic  letters  to  distribute  his  emphasis, 
never  a  footnote  for  assistance.  There  was  no  con- 
ception so  daring  that  he  shrank  from  attempting 
it ;  and  none  that  he  could  not  so  master  as  to 
state  it,  if  he  pleased,  in  terms  of  monosyllables. 

For  all  these  merits  he  paid  one  high  and  inexor- 
able penalty,  —  the  utter  absence  of  all  immediate 
or  dazzling  success.  His  publisher,  Goodrich,  tells 
us,  in  his  "  Reminiscences,"  1  that  Hawthorne  and 
Willis  began  to  write  together  in  "  The  Token," 
in  1827,  and  that  the  now-forgotten  Willis  "rose 
rapidly  to  fame,"  while  Hawthorne's  writings  "  did 
not  attract  the  slightest  attention."  The  only  rec- 
ognition of  his  merits  that  I  have  been  able  to 
find  in  the  contemporary  criticism  of  those  early 

»  Vol.  ii.,  p  269. 


10      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

years  is  in  "The  New-England  Magazine"  for 
October,  1834,  where  he  is  classed  approvingly 
with  those  who  were  then  considered  the  emi- 
nent writers  of  the  day,  —  Miss  Sedgwick,  Miss 
Leslie,  Verplanck,  Greenwood,  and  John  Neal. 
"  To  them,"  the  critic  says,  "  we  may  add  an 
anonymous  author  of  some  of  the  most  delicate 
and  beautiful  prose  ever  published  this  side  of 
the  Atlantic,  —  the  author  of  'The  Gentle  Boy.'  nl 
For  twenty  years  he  continued  to  be,  according 
to  his  own  statement,  "  the  obscurest  man  of 
letters  in  America."  Goodrich  testifies  that  it 
was  almost  impossible  to  find  a  publisher  for 
"Twice-Told  Tales"  in  1837,  and  I  can  myself 
remember  how  limited  a  circle  greeted  the  re- 
print in  the  enlarged  edition  of  1841.  When 
Poe,  about  1846,  wrote  patronizingly  of  Haw- 
thorne, he  added,  "  It  was  never  the  fashion,  until 
lately,  to  speak  of  him  in  any  summary  of  our  best 
authors."  2  Whittier  once  told  me  that  when  he 
himself  had  obtained,  with  some  difficulty,  in  1847, 
the  insertion  of  one  of  Hawthorne's  sketches  in 
"The  National  Era,"  the  latter  said  quietly, 
"  There  is  not  much  market  for  my  wares."  It  has 
always  seemed  to  me  the  greatest  triumph  of  his 

1  New-England  Magazine,  October,  1834,  p.  331. 

2  Poe's  Works  (ed.  1853),  iii.  189. 


HAWTHORNE.  II 

genius,  not  that  he  bore  poverty  without  a  murmur, 
—  for  what  right  has  a  literary  man,  who  can  com- 
mand his  time  and  his  art,  to  sigh  after  the  added 
enjoyments  of  mere  wealth? —  but  that  he  went  on 
doing  work  of  such  a  quality  for  an  audience  so 
small  or  so  indifferent. 

Whether  more  immediate  applause  would  have 
modified  the  result,  it  is  now  impossible  to  say. 
Having  so  much,  why  should  we  ask  for  more? 
An  immediate  popularity  might  possibly  have 
added  a  little  more  sunshine  to  his  thought,  a 
few  drops  of  redder  blood  to  his  style;  thus 
averting  the  only  criticism  that  can  ever  be  justly 
made  on  either.  Yet  this  very  privation  has  made* 
him  a  nobler  and  tenderer  figure  in  literary  history ; 
and  a  source  of  more  tonic  influence  for  young 
writers,  through  all  coming  time.  The  popular 
impression  of  Hawthorne  as  a  shy  and  lonely 
man,  gives  but  a  part  of  the  truth.  When  we 
think  of  him  as  reading  "  The  Scarlet  Letter  -'  to 
his  sympathetic  wife,  until  she  pressed  her  hands 
to  her  ears,  and  could  bear  no  more ;  or  when  we 
imagine  him  as  playing  with  his  children  so  gayly 
that  one  of  them  told  me  "  there  never  was  such 
a  playmate  in  all  the  world,"  —  we  may  teel  that  he 
had,  after  all,  the  very  best  that  earth  can  give,  and 
all  our  regrets  seem  only  an  impertinence. 


12      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 


POE. 

IT  happens  to  us  rarely  in  our  lives  to  come 
consciously  into  the  presence  of  that  extraor- 
dinary miracle  we  call  genius.  Among  the  many 
literary  persons  whom  I  have  happened  to  meet, 
at  home  or  abroad,  there  are  not  half  a  dozen 
who  have  left  an  irresistible  sense  of  this  rare 
quality ;  and,  among  these  few,  Poe  stands  next 
to  Hawthorne  in  the  vividness  of  personal  im- 
pression he  produced.  I  saw  him  but  once ;  and 
it  was  on  that  celebrated  occasion,  in  1845,  when 
he  startled  Boston  by  substituting  his  boyish  pro- 
duction, "  Al  Aaraaf,"  for  the  more  serious  poem 
which  he  was  to  have  delivered  before  the  Ly- 
ceum. There  was  much  curiosity  to  see  him ; 
for  his  prose-writings  had  been  eagerly  read,  at 
least  among  college-students,  and  his  poems  were 
just  beginning  to  excite  still  greater  attention. 
After  a  rather  solid  and  very  partisan  address  by 
Caleb  Gushing,  then  just  returned  from  his  Chi- 
nese embassy,  the  poet  was  introduced.  I  dis- 


POE.  13 

tinctly  recall  his  face,  with  its  ample  forehead, 
brilliant  eyes,  and  narrowness  of  nose  and  chin ; 
an  essentially  ideal  face,  not  noble,  yet  any  thing 
but  coarse ;  with  the  look  of  over-sensitiveness 
which  when  uncontrolled  may  prove  more  debas- 
ing than  coarseness.  It  was  a  face  to  rivet  one's 
attention  fe  any  crowd,  yet  a  face  that  no  one 
would  feel  safe  in  loving.  It  is  not  perhaps  strange 
that  I  find  or  fancy  in  the  portrait  of  Charles 
Baudelaire,  Poe's  French  admirer  and  translator, 
some  of  the  traits  that  are  indelibly  associated  with 
that  one  glimpse  of  Poe. 

I  remember  that  when  introduced  he  stood  with 
a  sort  of  shrinking  before  the  audience,  and  then 
began  in  a  thin,  tremulous,  hardly  musical  voice, 
an  apology  for  his  poem,  and  a  deprecation  of  the 
expected  criticism  of  the  Boston  public ;  reiterating 
this  in  a  sort  of  persistent,  querulous  way,  which  did 
not  seem  like  satire,  but  impressed  me  at  the  time 
as  nauseous  flattery.  It  was  not  then  generally 
known,  nor  was  it  established  for  a  long  time  after, 
—  even  when  he  had  himself  asserted  it,  —  that  the 
poet  was  himself  born  in  Boston ;  and  no  one  can 
now  tell,  perhaps,  what  was  the  real  feeling  behind 
the  apparently  sycophantic  attitude.  When,  at 
the  end,  he  abruptly  began  the  recitation  of  his 
rather  perplexing  poem,  everybody  looked  thor- 


14      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

oughly  mystified.  The  verses  had  long  since  been 
printed  in  his  youthful  volume,  and  had  re-appeared 
within  a  few  days,  if  I  mistake  not,  in  Wiley  & 
t Putnam's  edition  of  his  poems;  and  they  pro- 
duced no  very  distinct  impression  on  the  audience 
until  Poe  began  to  read  the  maiden's  song  in  the 
second  part.  Already  his  tones  had  been  soften- 
ing to  a  finer  melody  than  at  first,  and  when  he 
came  to  the  verse,  — 

*'  Ligeia !  Ligeia, 

My  beautiful  one ! 
Whose  harshest  idea 

Will  to  melody  run, 
Oh  !  is  it  thy  will 

On  the  breezes  to  toss  ? 
Or  capriciously  still 

Like  the  lon«  albatross 
Incumbent  on  night 

(As  she  on  the  air) 
To  keep  watch  with  delight 

On  the  harmony  there  ?  " 

his  voice  seemed  attenuated  to  the  finest  golden 
thread ;  the  audience  became  hushed,  and,  as  it 
were,  breathless ;  there  seemed  no  life  in  the  hall 
but  his ;  and  every  syllable  was  accentuated  with 
such  delicacy,  and  sustained  with  such  sweetness, 
as  I  never  heard  equalled  by  other  lips.  When 
the  lyric  ended,  it  was  like  the  ceasing  of  the 


POE.  15 

gypsy's  chant  in  Browning's  "Flight  of  the 
Duchess  ;  "  and  I  remember  nothing  more,  except 
that  in  walking  back  to  Cambridge  my  comrades 
and  I  felt  that  we  had  been  under  the  spell  of  some 
wizard.  Indeed,  I  feel  much  the  same  in  the 
retrospect,  to  this  day. 

The  melody  did  not  belong,  in  this  case,  to  the 
poet's  voice  alone :  it  was  already  in  the  words. 
His  verse,  when  he  was  willing  to  give  it  natural 
utterance,  was  like  that  of  Coleridge  in  rich  sweet- 
ness, and  like  that  was  often  impaired  by  theories 
of  structure  and  systematic  experiments  in  metre. 
Never  in  American  literature,  I  think,  was  such  a 
fountain  of  melody  flung  into  the  air  as  when 
"Lenore"  first  appeared  in  "The  Pioneer;"  and 
never  did  fountain  so  drop  downward  as  when  Poe 
re- arranged  it  in  its  present  form.  The  irregular 
measure  had  a  beauty  as  original  as  that  of 
"  Christabel ; "  and  the  lines  had  an  ever-varying, 
ever-lyrical  cadence  of  their  own,  until  their  author 
himself  took  them,  and  cramped  them  into  couplets. 
What  a  change  from 

"  Peccavimus  ! 
But  rave  not  thus ! 

And  let  the  solemn  song 
Go  up  to  God  so  mournfully  that  she  may  feel  no  wrong  I " 


l6      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

to  the  amended  version,  portioned  off  in  regular 
lengths,  thus :  — 

"  Peccavimus  !  but  rave  not  thus !  and  let  a  Sabbath  song 
Go  up  to  God  so  solemnly,  the  dead  may  feel  no  wrong." 

Or  worse  yet,  when  he  introduced  that  tedious 
jingle  of  slightly  varied  repetition  which  in  later 
year  reached  its  climax  in  lines  like  these  :  — 

"Till  the  fair  and  gentle  Eulalie  became  my  blushing  bride, 
Till  the  yellow-haired  young  Eulalie  became  my  smiling 
bride." 

This  trick,  caught  from  Poe,  still  survives  in  our 
literature ;  made  more  permanent,  perhaps,  by  the 
success  of  his  "  Raven."  This  poem,  which  made 
him  popular,  seems  to  me  far  inferior  to  some  of 
his  earlier  and  slighter  effusions ;  as  those  exquisite 
verses  "  To  Helen,"  which  are  among  our  American 
classics,  and  have  made 

"The  glory  that  was  Greece, 
And  the  grandeur  that  was  Rome," 

a  permanent  phrase  in  our  language. 

Poe's  place  in  purely  imaginative  prose-writing  is 
as  unquestionable  as  Hawthorne's.  He  even  suc- 
ceeded, which  Hawthorne  did  not,  in  penetrating 
the  artistic  indifference  of  the  French  mind ;  and 
it  was  a  substantial  triumph,  when  we  consider  that 
Baudelaire  put  himself  or  his  friends  to  the  trouble 


POE.  1 7 

of  translating  even  the  prolonged  platitudes  of 
"  Eureka,"  and  the  wearisome  narrative  o'f  "  Arthur 
Gordon  Pym."  Neither  Poe  nor  Hawthorne  has 
ever  been  fully  recognized  in  England ;  and  yet  no 
Englishman  of  our  time,  not  even  De  Quincey,  has 
done  any  prose  imaginative  work  to  be  named  with 
theirs.  But  in  comparing  Poe  with  Hawthorne, 
we  see  that  the  genius  of  the  latter  has  hands  and 
feet  as  well  as  wings,  so  that  all  his  work  is  solid 
as  masonry,  while  Poe's  is  broken  and  disfigured 
by  all  sorts  of  inequalities  and  imitations;  he 
not  disdaining,  for  want  of  true  integrity,  to  dis- 
guise and  falsify,  to  claim  knowledge  that  he  did 
not  possess,  to  invent  quotations  and  references, 
and  even,  as  Griswold  showed,  to  manipulate  and 
exaggerate  puffs  of  himself.  I  remember  the  cha- 
grin with  which  I  looked  through  Tieck,  in  my 
student-days,  to  find  the  "Journey  into  the  Blue 
Distance  "  to  which  Poe  refers  in  the  "  House  of 
Usher ; "  and  how  one  of  the  poet's  intimates 
laughed  me  to  scorn  for  being  deceived  by  any  of 
Poe's  citations,  saying  that  he  hardly  knew  a  word 
of  German. 

But,  making  all  possible  deductions,  how  wonder- 
ful remains  the  power  of  Poe's  imaginative  tales, 
and  how  immense  is  the  ingenuity  of  his  puzzles 
and  disentanglements  !  The  conundrums  of  Wilkie 


l8      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

Collins  never  renew  their  interest  after  the  answer 
is  known ;  but  Poe's  can  be  read  again  and  again. 
It  is  where  spiritual  depths  are  to  be  touched,  that 
he  shows  his  weakness ;  where  he  attempts  it,  as  in 
"  William  Wilson,"  it  seems  exceptional ;  where 
there  is  the  greatest  display  of  philosophic  form,  he 
is  often  most  trivial,  whereas  Hawthorne  is  often 
profoundest  when  he  has  disarmed  you  by  his  sim- 
plicity. The  truth  is,  that  Poe  lavished  on  things 
comparatively  superficial  those  great  intellectual 
resources  which  Hawthorne  reverently  husbanded 
and  used.  That  there  is  something  behind  even 
genius  to  make  or  mar  it,  this  is  the  lesson  of  the 
two  lives. 

Poe  makes  one  of  his  heroes  define  another  as 
"  that  monstrum  horrendum,  an  unprincipled  man 
of  genius."  It  is  in  the  malice  and  fury  of  his  own 
critical  work  that  his  low  moral  tone  most  betrays 
itself.  No  atmosphere  can  be  more  belittling  than 
that  of  his  "  New  York  Literati :  "  it  is  a  mass  of 
vehement  dogmatism  and  petty  personalities  ;  opin- 
ions warped  by  private  feeling,  and  varying  from 
page  to  page.  He  seemed  to  have  absolutely  no 
fixed  standard  of  critical  judgment,  though  it  is  true 
that  there  was  very  little  anywhere  in  America  during 
those  acrimonious  days,  when  the  most  honorable 
head  might  be  covered  with  insult  or  neglect, 


POE.  19 

while  any  young  poetess  who  smiled  sweetly  on  Poe 
or  Griswold  or  Willis  might  find  herself  placed 
among  the  Muses.  Poe  complimented  and  rather 
patronized  Hawthorne,  but  found  him  only  "  pecul- 
iar and  not  original ;  "  *  saying  of  him,  "  He  has 
not  half  the  material  for  the  exclusiveness  of  litera- 
ture that  he  has  for  its  universality,"  whatever  that 
may  mean ;  and  finally  he  tried  to  make  it  appear 
that  Hawthorne  had  borrowed  from  himself.  He 
returned  again  and  again  to  the  attack  on  Long- 
fellow as  a  wilful  plagiarist,  denouncing  the  trivial 
resemblance  between  his  "  Midnight  Mass  for  the 
Dying  Year  "  and  Tennyson's  "  Death  of  the  Old 
Year,"  as  "  belonging  to  the  most  barbarous  class 
of  literary  piracy." 2  To  make  this  attack  was,  as 
he  boasted,  "  to  throttle  the  guilty ;  "  *  and  while 
dealing  thus  ferociously  with  Longfellow,  thus  con- 
descendingly with  Hawthorne,  he  was  claiming  a 
foremost  rank  among  American  authors  for  obscuri- 
ties now  forgotten,  such  as  Mrs.  Amelia  B.  Welby 
and  Estelle  Anne  Lewis.  No  one  ever  did  more 
than  Poe  to  lower  the  tone  of  literary  criticism  in 
this  country ;  and  the  greater  his  talent,  the  greater 
the  mischief. 
As  a  poet  he  held  for  a  time  the  place  earlier 

»  Works,  ed.  1853,  III.,  202.       *  Works,  ed.  1853,  HI.,  325. 
»  III.,  300. 


20      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

occupied  by  Byron,  and  later  by  Swinburne,  as  the 
patron  saint  of  all  wilful  boys  suspected  of  genius, 
and  convicted  at  least  of  its  infirmities.  He  be- 
longed to  the  melancholy  class  of  wasted  men,  like 
the  German  Hoffman,  whom  perhaps  of  all  men  of 
genius  he  most  resembled.  No  doubt,  if  we  are 
to  apply  any  standard  of  moral  weight  or  sanity  to 
authors,  —  a  proposal  which  Poe  would  doubtless 
have  ridiculed,  —  it  can  only  be  in  a  very  large 
and  generous  way.  If  a  career  has  only  a  manly 
ring  to  it,  we  can  forgive  many  errors  —  as  in  read- 
ing, for  instance,  the  autobiography  of  Benvenuto 
Cellini,  carrying  always  his  life  in  his  hand  amid  a 
brilliant  and  reckless  society.  But  the  existence  of 
a  poor  Bohemian,  besotted  when  he  has  money, 
angry  and  vindictive  when  the  money  is  spent,  this 
is  a  dismal  tragedy,  for  which  genius  only  makes 
the  footlights  burn  with  more  lustre.  There  is  a 
passage  in  Keats's  letters,  written  from  the  haunts 
of  Burns,  in  which  he  expresses  himself  as  filled  with 
pity  for  the  poet's  life  :  "  he  drank  with  blackguards, 
he  was  miserable ;  we  can  see  horribly  clear  in  the 
works  of  such  a  man  his  life,  as  if  we  were  God's 
spies."  Yet  Burns's  sins  and  miseries  left  his  heart 
unspoiled,  and  this  cannot  be  said  of  Poe.  After 
all,  the  austere  virtues  —  the  virtues  of  Emerson, 
Hawthorne,  Whittier  —  are  the  best  soil  for  genius. 


POE.  21 

I  like  best  to  think  of  Poe  as  associated  with 
his  betrothed,  Sarah  Helen  Whitman,  whom  I  saw 
sometimes  in  her  later  years.  That  gifted  woman 
had  outlived  her  early  friends  and  loves  and  hopes, 
and  perhaps  her  literary  fame,  such  as  it  was :  she 
had  certainly  outlived  her  recognized  ties  with  Poe, 
and  all  but  his  memory.  There  she  dwelt  in  her 
little  suite  of  rooms,  bearing  youth  still  in  her  heart 
and  in  her  voice,  and  on  her  hair  also,  and  in  her 
dress.  Her  dimly-lighted  parlor  was  always  decked, 
here  and  there,  with  scarlet ;  and  she  sat,  robed  in 
white,  with  her  back  always  turned  to  the  light,  thus 
throwing  a  discreetly  tinted  shadow  over  her  still 
thoughtful  and  noble  face.  She  seemed  a  person 
embalmed  while  still  alive :  it  was  as  if  she  might 
dwell  forever  there,  prolonging  into  an  indefinite 
future  the  tradition  of  a  poet's  love ;  and  when  we 
remembered  that  she  had  been  Poe's  betrothed,  that 
his  kisses  had  touched  her  lips,  that  she  still  believed 
in  him  and, was  his  defender,  all  criticism  might  well, 
for  her  sake,  be  disarmed,  and  her  saintly  life  atone 
for  his  stormy  and  sad  career. 


22      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 


THOREAU. 

THERE  is  no  fame  more  permanent  than  that 
which  begins  its  real  growth  after  the  death 
of  an  author ;  and  such  is  the  fame  of  Thoreau. 
Before  his  death  he  had  published  but  two  books, 
"  A  Week  on  the  Concord  and  Merrimack  Rivers," 
and  "  Walden."  Four  more  have  since  been 
printed,  besides  a  volume  of  his  letters  and  two 
biographies.  One  of  these  last  appeared  within 
a  year  or  two  in  England,  where  he  was,  up  to 
the  time  of  his  death,  absolutely  unknown.  Such 
things  are  not  accidental  or  the  result  of  whim,  and 
they  indicate  that  the  literary  fame  of  Thoreau  is 
secure.  Indeed,  it  has  already  survived  two  of  the 
greatest  dangers  that  can  beset  reputation,  —  a  bril- 
liant satirist  for  a  critic,  and  an  injudicious  friend 
for  a  biographer. 

Both  admirer  and  censor,  both  Channing  in  his 
memoir,  and  Lowell  in  his  well  known  criticism, 
have  brought  the  eccentricities  of  Thoreau  into  un- 
due prominence,  and  have  placed  too  little  stress 


THOREAU.  23 

on  the  vigor,  the  good  sense,  the  clear  perceptions, 
of  the  man.  I  have  myself  walked,  talked,  and 
corresponded  with  him,  and  can  testify  that  the 
impression  given  by  both  these  writers  is  far  re- 
moved from  that  ordinarily  made  by  Thoreau  him- 
self. While  tinged  here  and  there,  like  most  New 
England  thinkers  of  his  time,  with  the  manner  of 
Emerson,  he  was  yet,  as  a  companion,  essentially 
original,  wholesome,  and  enjoyable.  Though  more 
or  less  of  a  humorist,  nursing  his  own  whims,  and 
capable  of  being  tiresome  when  they  came  upper- 
most, he  was  easily  led  away  from  them  to  the  vast 
domains  of  literature  and  nature,  and  then  poured 
forth  endless  streams  of  the  most  interesting  talk. 
He  taxed  the  patience  of  his  companions,  but  not 
more  so,  on  the  whole,  than  is  done  by  many  other 
eminent  talkers  when  launched  upon  their  favorite 
themes. 

It  is  hard  for  one  who  thus  knew  him  to  be  quite 
patient  with  Lowell  in  what  seems  almost  wanton 
misrepresentation.  Lowell  applies  to  Thoreau  the 
word  "  indolent :  "  but  you  might  as  well  speak  of 
the  indolence  of  a  self-registering  thermometer; 
it  does  not  go  about  noisily,  yet  it  never  knows  an 
idle  moment.  Lowell  says  that  Thoreau  "  looked 
with  utter  contempt  on  the  august  drama  of  des- 
tiny, of  which  his  country  was  the  scene,  and  on 


24      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

which  the  curtain  had  already  risen ;  "  ]  but  was  it 
Thoreau,  or  Lowell,  who  found  a  voice  when  the 
curtain  fell,  after  the  first  act  of  that  drama,  upon 
the  scaffold  of  John  Brown  ?  Lowell  accuses  him 
of  a  "  seclusion  which  keeps  him  in  the  public 
eye,"  and  finds  something  "  delightfully  absurd  "  in 
his  addressing  six  volumes  under  such  circum- 
stances to  the  public,  when  the  fact  is  that  four  of 
these  volumes  were  made  up  by  friends,  after  Tho- 
reau's  death,  from  his  manuscripts,  or  from  his 
stray  papers  in  newspapers  and  magazines.  Lowell 
accepts  throughout  the  popular  misconception  — 
and  has,  indeed,  done  much  to  strengthen  it  —  that 
Thoreau  hated  civilization,  and  believed  only  in 
the  wilderness ;  whereas  Thoreau  defined  his  own 
position  on  this  point  with  exceeding  clearness,  and 
made  it  essentially  the  same  with  that  of  his  critics. 
"  For  a  permanent  residence  it  seemed  to  me  that 
there  could  be  no  comparison  between  this  [Con- 
cord] and  the  wilderness,  necessary  as  the  latter  is 
for  a  resource  and  a  background,  the  raw  material 
of  all  our  civilization.  The  wilderness  is  simple 
almost  to  barrenness.  The  partially  cultivated 
country  it  is  which  chiefly  has  inspired,  and  will 
continue  to  inspire,  the  strains  of  poets  such  as 
compose  the  mass  of  any  literature."  2 

1  My  Study  Windows,  p.  206.     2  Maine  Woods,  p.  159;  written  in  1846. 


THOREAU.  25 

Seen  in  the  light  of  such  eminently  sensible  re- 
marks as  these,  it  will  by  and  by  be  discovered 
that  Thoreau's  whole  attitude  has  been  need- 
lessly distorted.  Lowell  says  that  "  his  shanty- 
life  was  mere  impossibility,  so  far  as  his  own 
conception  of  it  goes,  as  an  entire  independency 
of  mankind.  The  tub  of  Diogenes  had  a  sounder 
bottom."  l  But  what  a  man  of  straw  is  this  that 
Lowell  is  constructing !  What  is  this  "  shanty- 
life  "  ?  A  young  man  living  in  a  country  village, 
and  having  a  passion  for  the  minute  observation  of 
nature,  and  a  love  for  Greek  and  Oriental  reading, 
takes  it  into  his  head  to  build  himself  a  study,  not 
in  the  garden  or  the  orchard,  but  in  the  woods,  by 
the  side  of  a  lake.  Happening  to  be  poor,  and  to 
live  in  a  time  when  social  experiments  are  in  vogue 
at  Brook  Farm  and  elsewhere,  he  takes  a  whimsical 
satisfaction  in  seeing  how  cheaply  he  can  erect  his 
hut,  and  afterwards  support  himself  by  the  labor  of 
his  hands..  He  is  not  really  banished  from  the 
world,  nor  does  he  seek  or  profess  banishment: 
indeed,  his  house  is  not  two  miles  from  his  mother's 
door ;  and  he  goes  to  the  village  every  day  or  two, 
by  his  own  showing,  to  hear  the  news.2  In  this 
quiet  abode  he  spends  two  years,  varied  by  an 
occasional  excursion  into  the  deeper  wilderness  at  a 

1  My  Study  Windows,  p.  208.  *  Walden,  p.  181. 


26      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

distance.  He  earns  an  honest  living  by  gardening 
and  land-surveying,  makes  more  close  and  delicate 
observations  on  nature  than  any  other  American 
has  ever  made,  and  writes  the  only  book  yet  written 
in  America,  to  my  thinking,  that  bears  an  annual 
perusal.  Can  it  be  really  true  that  this  is  a  life  so 
wasted,  so  unpardonable  ? 

The  artist  LaFarge  built  himself  a  studio  as  bare 
as  Thoreau's  and  almost  as  lonely,  among  the  Para- 
dise Rocks,  near  Newport,  and  used  to  withdraw 
from  the  fashionable  summer  world  to  that  safe 
retreat.  Lowell  himself  has  celebrated  in  immor- 
tal verse  the  self-seclusion  of  Professor  Gould, 
who  would  lock  himself  into  his  Albany  observa- 
tory, and  leave  his  indignant  trustees  to  "  admire 
the  keyhole's  contour  grand  "  from  without.  Is 
the  naturalist's  work  so  much  inferior  to  the  art- 
ist's, —  are  the  stars  of  thought  so  much  less  impor- 
tant than  those  of  space,  —  that  LaFarge  and  Gould 
are  to  be  praised  for  their  self-devotion,  and  yet 
Thoreau  is  to  be  held  up  to  all  coming  time  as 
selfish?  For  my  own  part,  with  "  Walden  "  in  my 
hands,  I  wish  that  every  other  author  in  Amer- 
ica might  try  the  experiment  of  two  years  in  a 
"  shanty." 

Let  me  not  seem  to  do  injustice  to  Lowell,  who 
closes  his  paper  on  Thoreau  with  a  generous  tribute 


THOREAU.  27 

that  does  much  to  redeem  his  earlier  injustice. 
The  truth  is,  that  Thoreau  shared  the  noble  protest 
against  worldliness  of  what  is  called  the  "  transcen- 
dental "  period,  in  America,  and  naturally  shared 
some  of  the  intellectual  extravagances  of  that  seeth- 
ing time ;  but  he  did  not,  like  some  of  his  con- 
temporaries, make  his  whims  an  excuse  for  mere 
selfishness,  and  his  home  life — always  the  best  test 
—  was  thoroughly  affectionate  and  faithful.  His 
lifelong  celibacy  was  due,  if  I  have  been  correctly 
informed,  to  an  early  act  of  lofty  self-abnegation 
toward  his  own  brother,  whose  love  had  taken  the 
same  direction  with  his  own.  Certainly  his  per- 
sonal fortitude  amid  the  privations  and  limitations 
of  his  own  career  was  nothing  less  than  heroic. 
There  is  nothing  finer  in  literary  history  than  his 
description,  in  his  unpublished  diary,  of  receiving 
from  his  publisher  the  unsold  copies  —  nearly  the 
whole  edition  —  of  his  "  Week  on  the  Concord  and 
Merrimack  Rivers,"  and  of  his  carrying  the  melan- 
choly burden  up-stairs  on  his  shoulders  to  his 
study.  "I  have  now  a  library,"  he  says,  "of 
nearly  nine  hundred  volumes,  over  seven  hundred 
of  which  I  wrote  myself."  ! 

It  will  always  be  an  interesting  question,  how  far 

1  By  the  kindness  of  my  friend  H.  G.  O  Blake,  Esq.,  of  Worcester, 
Mass.,  the  custodian  of  Thoreau's  manuscripts,  I  am  enabled  to  print 
this  entire  passage  at  the  end  of  this  chapter. 


28      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

Thoreau's  peculiar  genius  might  have  been  modi- 
fied or  enriched  by  society  or  travel.  In  his  diary 
he  expresses  gratitude  to  Providence,  or,  as  he 
quaintly  puts  it,  "  to  those  who  have  had  the  hand- 
ling of  me,"  that  his  life  has  been  so  restricted  in 
these  directions,  and  that  he  has  thus  been  com- 
pelled to  extract  its  utmost  nutriment  from  the  soil 
where  he  was  born.  Yet  in  examining  these  diaries, 
even  more  than  in  reading  his  books,  one  is  led  to 
doubt,  after  all,  whether  this  mental  asceticism  was 
best  for  him,  just  as  one  suspects  that  the  vegetable 
diet  in  which  he  exulted  may  possibly  have  short- 
ened his  life.  A  larger  experience  might  have  lib- 
eralized some  of  his  judgments,  and  softened  some 
of  his  verdicts.  He  was  not  as  just  to  men  as  to 
woodchucks ;  and  his  "  simplify,  I  say,  simplify," 
might  well  have  been  relaxed  a  little  for  mankind, 
in  view  of  the  boundless  affluence  of  external 
nature.  The  world  of  art  might  also  have  deeply 
influenced  him,  had  the  way  been  opened  for  its 
closer  study.  Emerson  speaks  of  "  the  raptures  of 
a  citizen  arrived  at  his  first  meadow ;  "  but  a  deep, 
ascetic  soul  like  Thoreau's  could  hardly  have  failed 
to  be  touched  to  a  far  profounder  emotion  by  the 
first  sight  of  a  cathedral. 

The  impression  that  Thoreau  was  but  a  minor 
Emerson  will  in  time  pass  away,  like  the  early  class- 


THOREAU.  29 

ification  of  Emerson  as  a  second-hand  Carlyle. 
All  three  were  the  children  of*  their  time,  and  had 
its  family  likeness  ;  but  Thoreau  had  the  lumen  sic- 
<•/////,  or  "  dry  light,"  beyond  either  of  the  others ; 
indeed,  beyond  all  men  of  his  day.  His  tempera- 
ment was  like  his  native  air  in  winter,  —  clear,  frosty, 
inexpressibly  pure  and  bracing.  His  power  of  lit- 
erary appreciation  was  something  marvellous,  and 
his  books  might  well  be  read  for  their  quotations, 
like  the  sermons  of  Jeremy  Taylor.  His  daring 
imagination  ventured  on  the  delineation  of  just 
those  objects  in  nature  which  seem  most  defiant  of 
description,  as  smoke,  mist,  haze ;  and  his  three 
poems  on  these  themes  have  an  exquisite  felicity  of 
structure  such  as  nothing  this  side  of  the  Greek 
anthology  can  equal.  Indeed,  the  value  of  the 
classic  languages  was  never  better  exemplified  than 
in  their  influence  on  his  training.  They  were  real 
"  humanities  "  to  him ;  linking  him  with  the  great 
memories  of  the  race,  and  with  high  intellectual 
standards,  so  that  he  could  never,  like  some  of  his 
imitators,  treat  literary  art  as  a  thing  unmanly  and 
trivial.  His  selection  of  points  in  praising  his 
favorite  books  shows  this  discrimination.  He  loves 
to  speak  of  "  the  elaborate  beauty  and  finish,  and 
the  lifelong  literary  labors  of  the  ancients  .  .  . 
works  as  refined,  as  solidly  done,  and  as  beautiful 


30      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

almost,  as  the  morning  itself."  *  I  remember  ho\v 
that  fine  old  classical  scholar,  the  late  John  Glen 
King,  of  Salem,  used  to  delight  in  Thoreau  as  being 
"  the  only  man  who  thoroughly  loved  both  nature 
and  Greek." 

Thoreau  died  at  forty-four,  without  having 
achieved  fame  or  fortune.  It  is  common  to  speak 
of  his  life  as  a  failure  ;  but  to  me  it  seems,  with  all 
its  drawbacks,  to  have  been  a  great  and  eminent 
success.  Even  testing  it  only  by  the  common  appe- 
tite of  authors  for  immortality,  his  seems  already  a 
sure  and  enviable  place.  Time  is  rapidly  melting 
away  the  dross  from  his  writings,  and  exhibiting 
their  gold.  But  his  standard  was  higher  than  the 
mere  desire  for  fame,  and  he  has  told  it  plainly. 
"There  is  nowhere  recorded,"  he  complains,  "a 
simple  and  irrepressible  satisfaction  with  the  gift  of 
life,  any  memorable  praise  of  God.  ...  If  the  day 
and  the  night  are  such  that  you  greet  them  with  joy, 
and  life  emits  a  fragrance,  like  flowers  and  sweet- 
scented  herbs,  —  is  more  elastic,  starry,  and  immor- 
tal, —  that  is  your  success."  - 

NOTE. —  The  following  passage  is  now  first  published, 
from  Thoreau's  manuscript  diary,  the  date  being  Oct.  28, 

I853-- 

"  For  a  year  or  two  past,  my  publisher,  Munroe,  has  been 

«  Walden,  p.  113.  »  Walden,  pp.  85,  233. 


THOREAU.  31 

writing  from  time  to  time  to  ask  what  disposition  should  be 
made  of  the  copies  of  '  A  Week  on  the  Concord  and  Mer- 
rimack  Rivers,'  still  on  hand,  and  at  last  suggesting  that  he 
had  use  for  the  room  they  occupied  in  his  cellar.  So  I  had 
them  all  sent  to  me  here ;  and  they  have  arrived  to-day  by 
express,  piling  the  man's  wagon,  seven  hundred  and  six 
copies  out  of  an  edition  of  one  thousand,  which  I  bought  of 
Munroe  four  years  ago,  and  have  been  ever  since  paying  for, 
and  have  not  quite  paid  for  yet.  The  wares  are  sent  to  me 
at  last,  and  I  have  an  opportunity  to  examine  my  purchase. 
They  are  something  more  substantial  than  fame,  as  my 
back  knows,  which  has  borne  them  up  two  flights  of  stairs 
to  a  place  similar  to  that  to  which  they  trace  their  origin. 
Of  the  remaining  two  hundred  ninety  and  odd,  seventy-five 
were  given  away,  the  rest  sold.  I  have  now  a  library  of 
nearly  nine  hundred  volumes,  over  seven  hundred  of  which 
I  wrote  myself.  Is  it  not  well  that  the  author  should  be- 
hold the  fruits  of  his  labor?  My  works  are  piled  up  in  my 
chamber,  half  as  high  as  my  head,  my  opera  omnia.  This 
/s  authorship.  These  are  the  work  of  my  brain.  There 
was  just  one  piece  of  good  luck  in  the  venture.  The  un- 
bound were  tied  up  by  the  printer  four  years  ago  in  stout 
paper  wrappers,  and  inscribed,  *  H.  D.  Thoreau's  Concord 
River,  fifty  copies.'  So  Munroe  had  only  to  cross  out 
'  River,'  and  write  '  Mass.,'  and  deliver  them  to  the  express- 
man at  once.  I  can  see  now  what  I  write  for,  and  the  result 
of  my  labors.  Nevertheless,  in  spite  of  this  result,  sitting 
beside  the  inert  mass  of  my  works,  I  take  up  my  pen  to- 
night to  record  what  thought  or  experience  I  may  have 
had,  with  as  much  satisfaction  as  ever.  Indeed,  I  believe 
that  this  result  is  more  inspiring  and  better  than  if  a  thou- 
sand had  bought  my  wares.  It  affects  my  privacy  less,  and 
leaves  me  freer." 


32      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 


HOWELLS. 

IT  has  perhaps  been  a  misfortune  to  Mr.  How- 
ells,  that  in  his  position  of  editor  of  "  The  Atlan- 
tic Monthly  "  he  has  inevitably  been  shielded  from 
much  of  that  healthful  discussion  which  is  usually 
needed  for  the  making  of  a  good  author.  Sir 
Arthur  Helps  says,  that,  if  ordinary  criticism  gives 
us  little,  it  is  still  worth  having :  if  it  is  not  marked 
by  common  sense,  it  still  brings  to  us  the  common 
nonsense,  which  is  quite  as  important.  But  the 
conductor  of  the  leading  literary  magazine  of  a 
nation  is  very  apt  to  escape  this  wholesome  ordeal. 
Delicacy  of  course  forbids  his  admitting  any  men- 
tion of  himself,  whether  for  praise  or  blame,  within 
his  own  pages.  Moreover,  his  leading  literary  con- 
temporaries are  also  his  contributors ;  and  for  them 
to  discuss  him  freely,  even  elsewhere,  is  like  publicly 
.debating  the  character  of  one's  habitual  host.  Com- 
pare the  position,  in  this  respect,  of  Mr.  Howells 
and  Mr.  Henry  James,  Jr.  Their  writings  are  equal- 
ly conspicuous  before  the  community ;  their  merits 


HOWELLS.  33 

are  equally  marked,  and  so  also  are  their  demerits, 
real  or  attributed ;  yet  what,  a  difference  in  the 
amount  of  criticism  awarded  to  each  !  Each  new 
book  by  Mr.  Howells  is  received  with  an  almost 
monotonous  praise,  as  if  it  had  no  individuality,  no 
salient  points ;  while  each  story  by  Mr.  James  is 
debated  through  and  through  the  newspapers,  as  if 
it  were  a  fresh  Waverley  novel.  I  see  no  reason 
for  this  difference,  except  that  Mr.  Howells  edits 
"  The  Atlantic  Monthly,"  and  that  all  other  Ameri- 
can writers  are,  as  it  were,  sitting  at  his  table,  or 
wishing  themselves  there.  He  must  himself  regret 
this  result,  for  he  is  too  essentially  an  artist  not  to 
prize  honest  and  faithful  criticism  ;  and  it  is  almost 
needless  to  say  that  his  career  as  an  author  has 
been  thoroughly  modest  and  free  from  all  the  arts 
of  self-praise. 

The  peculiar  c^ana^ef  4ws-  prose  style  Jias_also, 
doubtless,  had  its  effect  in  disarming  criticism.  He 
rarely  fails  to  give  pleasure  by  the  mere  process  of 
writing,  and  this  is  much,  to  begin  with  ;  just  as, 
when  we  are  listening  to  conversation,  a  musical 
voice  gratifies  us  almost  more  than  wit  or  wisdom. 
Mr.  Howells  is  without  an  equal  in  America  —  and 
therefore  without  an  equal  among  his  English- 
speaking  contemporaries  —  as  to  some  of  the  most 
attractive  literary  graces.  He  has  no  rival  in  half- 


34      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

tints,  in  modulations,  in  subtile  phrases  that  touch 
the  edge  of  an  assertion  and  yet  stop  short  of  it. 
He  is  like  a  skater  who  executes  a  hundred  graceful 
curves  within  the  limits  of  a  pool  a  few  yards  square. 
Miss  Austen,  the  novelist,  once  described  her  art  as 
a  little  bit  of  ivory,  on  which  she  produced  small 
effect  after  much  labor.  She  underrated  her  own 
skill,  as  the  comparison  in  some  respects  underrates 
that  of  Howells;  but  his  field  is  —  or  has  until 
lately  seemed  to  be  —  the  little  bit  of  ivory. 

This  is  attributing  to  him  only  what  he  has  been 
careful  to  claim  for  himself.  He  tells  his  methods 
very  frankly,  and  his  first  literary_j)rinciple  has  been 
to  looJ^aimyJrQiXL-grjea^^assions,  and  rather  to  ele- 
vate the  commonpkcer4)y  minute__touches.  Not 
only  does  he  prefer  this,  but  he  does  not  hesitate  to 
tell  us  sometimes,  half  jestingly,  that  it  is  the  only 
thing  to  do.  "  As  in  literature  the  true  artist  will 
shun  the  use  even  of  real  events  if  they  are  of  an 
improbable  character,  so  the  sincere  observer  of 
man  will  not  desire  to  look  upon  his  heroic  or  oc- 
casional phases,  but  will  seek  him  in  his  habitual 
moods  of  vacancy  and  tiresomeness."  l  He  may 
not  mean  to  lay  this  down  as  a  canon  of  universal 
authority,  but  he  accepts  it  himself;  and  he  accepts 
with  it  the  risk  involved  of  a  too-limited  and  micro- 

1  Their  Wedding  Journey,  p.  86. 


HOWELLS.  35 

scopic  range.  That  he  has  finally  escaped  this 
peril,  is  due  to  the  fact  that  his  method  went,  after 
all,  deeper  than  he  admitted  :  he  was  not  merely  a 
good-natured  observer,  like  Geoffrey  Crayon,  Gen- 
tleman, but  he  had  thoughts  and  purposes,  some- 
thing to  protest  against,  and  something  to  say. 

He  is  often  classed  with  Mr.  James  as  represent- 
ing the  international  school  of  novelists,  yet  in 
reality  they  belong  to  widely  different  subdivisions. 
After  all,  Mr.  James  has  permanently  set  up  his 
easel  in  Europe,  Mr.  Howells  in  America ;  and  the 
latter  has  been,  from  the  beginning,  far  less  anxious 
to  compare  Americans  with  Europeans  than  with 
one  another.  He  is  international  only  if  we  adopt 
Mr.  Emerson's  saying,  that  Europe  stretches  to  the 
Alleghanies.  As  a  native  of  Ohio,  transplanted  to 
Massachusetts,  he  never  can  forego  the  interest  im- 
plied in  this  double  point  of  view.  The  Euro- 
peanized  American,  and,  if  we  may  so  say,  the 
Americanized  American,  are  the  typical  figures  that 
re-appear  in  his  books.  Even  in  "The  Lady  of 
the  Aroostook,"  although  the  voyagers  reach  the 
other  side  at  last,  the  real  contrast  is  found  on 
board  ship ;  and,  although  his  heroine  was  reared 
in  a  New- England  village,  he  cannot  forego  the  sat- 
isfaction of  having  given  her  California  for  a  birth- 
place. Mr.  James  writes  "  international  episodes  :  " 


36      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

Mr.  Hovvells  writes  inter-oceanic  episodes  :  his  best 
scenes  imply  a  dialogue  between  the  Atlantic  and 
Pacific  slopes. 

It  was  long  expected  that  there  would  appear 
some  sequel  to  his  "  Chance  Acquaintance."  Bos- 
tonians  especially  wished  to  hear  more  of  Miles 
Arbuton :  they  said,  "  It  is  impossible  to  leave  a 
man  so  well-dressed  in  a  situation  so  humiliating." 
But  the  sequel  has,  in  reality,  come  again  and 
again  ;  the  same  theme  re-appears  in  "  Out  of  the 
Question,"  in  "  The  Lady  of  the  Aroostook ;  "  it 
will  re-appear  while  Mr.  Howells  lives.  He  is  really 
contributing  important  studies  to  the  future  organ- 
ization of  our  society.  Ho\v  is  it  to  be  stratified  ? 
How  much  weight  is  to  be  given  to  intellect,  to 
character,  to  wealth,  to  antecedents,  to  inheritance  ? 
Not  only  must  a  republican  nation  meet  and  solve 
these  problems,  but  the  solution  is  more  assisted 
by  the  writers  of  romances  than  by  the  compilers 
of  statistics.  Fourth  of  July  orators  cannot  even 
state  the  problem  :  it  almost  baffles  the  finest  touch. 
As,  in  England,  you  may  read  every  thing  ever  writ- 
ten about  the  Established  Church,  and  yet,  after  all, 
if  you  wish  to  know  what  a  bishop  or  a  curate  is, 
you  must  go  to  Trollope's  novels,  so,  to  trace 
American  "  society  "  in  its  formative  process,  you 
must  go  to  Howells ;  he  alone  shows  you  the  es- 


HOWELLS.  37 

sential  forces  in  action.  He  can  philosophize  well 
enough  on  the  subject,  as  .where  he  points  out 
thai  hereditary  wealth  in  America  as  yet  represents 
"  nothing  in  the  world,  no  great  culture,  no  political 
influence,  no  civic  aspiration,  not  even  a  pecuniary 
force,  nothing  but  a  social  set,  an  alien  club  life, 
a  tradition  of  dining."  l  But  he  is  not  at  heart  a 
philosopher ;  he  is  a  novelist,  which  is  better,  and 
his  dramatic  situations  recur  again  and  again  to  the 
essential  point. 

It  is  this  constant  purpose  which  gives  dignity 
and  weight  to  his  American  delineations,  even 
where  he  almost  wantonly  checks  himself  and  dis- 
appoints us.  Were  he  merely,  as  some  suppose,  a 
skilful  miniature-painter  of  young  girls  at  watering- 
places,  his  sphere  would  be  very  circumscribed. 
At  times  he  seems  tempted  to  yield  to  this  limita- 
tion—  during  his  brief  foray  into  the  path  of  short 
dramatic  sketches,  for  instance.  These  sketches 
provoked  comparison  with  innumerable  French  tri- 
fles, which  they  could  not  rival  in  execution.  "  Pri- 
vate Theatricals  "  offers  the  same  thing  on  a  larger 
scale,  and  under  still  greater  disadvantages.  Mrs. 
Farrell  reveals  herself,  at  the  first  glance,  as  a 
coquette  too  shallow  and  vulgar  to  be  really  inter- 
esting; and  she  never  rises  above  that  level  until 

1  Their  Wedding  Journey,  p.  69. 


38      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

she  disappears  from  the  scene,  flinging  her  last  net 
for  the  cow-boy  in  the  pasture.  Her  habit  of  flirt- 
ing is  a  garment  deliberately  put  on,  an  armor  that 
creaks  in  the  wearing.  But  if  you  wish  to  see  how 
a  Frenchman  draws  a  coquette,  read  "  Le  Fianc£ 
de  Mile.  St.  Maur,"  by  Cherbuliez.  The  coquetry 
of  Mme.  d'Arolles  is  always  round  her  as  an  atmos- 
phere, intangible,  all-embracing,  fold  within  fold  ; 
she  coquets  even  with  a  rudimentary  organ  in 
herself  that  might  be  called  her  conscience ;  and 
then,  besides  this  enveloping  atmosphere,  she  wears 
always  a  thin  garment  of  social  refinement  that 
seems  to  shield  her  even  when  the  last  shred  of 
decorum  is  about  to  drop.  She  is  a  thoroughly 
artistic  creation  ;  in  watching  her  never  so  closely, 
you  cannot  see  the  wires  pulled  ;  but  in  "  Private 
Theatricals  "  we  seem  constantly  to  have  notice 
given,  "  Please  observe,  Mrs.  Farrell  is  about  to 
attitudinize  ! " 

The  moral  of  all  this  is,  that  Mr.  Howells  can- 
not be,  if  he  would,  an  artist  per  se,  like  Droz,  in 
reading  whose  brilliant  trifles  we  are  in  a  world 
where  the  execution  is  all,  the  thought  nothing,  and 
the  moral  less  than  nothing.  Nor  does  he  suc- 
ceed, like  Thackeray,  in  making  a  novel  attractive 
without  putting  a  single  agreeable  character  into 
it :  Thackeray  barely  accomplished  this  in  "  Vanity 


HOWELLS.  39 

Fair ;  "  Mr.  Howells  was  far  less  successful  in  the 
most  powerful  and  least  satisfactory  of  all  his  hooks, 
"  A  Foregone  Conclusion."  The  greatest  step  he 
has  ever  taken,  both  in  popularity  and  in  artistic 
success,  has  been  won  by  trusting  himself  to  a  gen- 
erous impulse,  and  painting  in  "  The  Lady  of  the 
Aroostook  "  a  character  worth  the  pains  of  describ- 
ing. The  book  is  not,  to  my  thinking,  free  from 
faults :  the  hero  poses  and  proses,  and  the  drunken 
man  is  so  realistic  as  to  be  out  of  place  and  over- 
done ;  but  the  character  of  the  heroine  seems  to 
me  the  high-water  mark  of  Mr.  Howells.  It  has 
been  feared  that  he  would  always  remain  the  charm- 
ing delineator  of  people  who  were,  after  all,  under- 
sized, —  heroes  and  heroines  like  the  little  figurines 
from  Tanagra,  or  the  admirable  miniature  groups 
of  John  Rogers.  He  has  now  allowed  himself  a 
bolder  sweep  of  arm,  a  more  generous  handling  of 
full--sized  humanity ;  and  with  this  work  begins, 
we  may  fain  believe,  the  maturity  of  his  genius. 


40      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 


HELEN  JACKSON.     ("  H.  H.") 

M'LLE  DE  MONTPENSIER,  grand-daugh- 
ter of  Henri  Quatre,  is  said  to  have  been 
"  so  famous  in  history  that  her  name  never  appears 
in  it ; "  she  being  known  only  as  "  La  Grande 
Mademoiselle."  This  anonymousness  may  help  the 
fame  of  a  princess,  but  it  must  hurt  that  of  an  au- 
thor. The  initials  "  L.  E.  L.,"  so  familiar  to  some 
,of  us  in  childhood,  stood  for  a  fame  soon  forgotten  ; 
and  this  not  so  much  because  her  poetry  was  weak, 
but  because  her  name  was  in  a  manner  nameless. 
However  popular  might  be  the  poems  of  "  H.  H.," 
they  were  still  attached  to  a  rather  vague  and  form- 
less personality  so  long  as  these  initials  only  were 
given ;  to  combine  with  this  the  still  remoter  indi- 
viduality of  "  Saxe  Holm,"  was  only  to  deepen  the 
sense  of  vagueness ;  and  if  all  the  novels  of  the 
"  No  Name  "  series,  instead  of  two  of  them,  had 
been  attributed  to  the  same  shadowy  being,  every 
one  would  have  pronounced  the  suggestion  quite 
credible.  To  take  these  various  threads  of  mystery, 


HELEN    JACKSON.  41 

and  weave  them  into  a  substantial  fame,  this  passed 
the  power  of  public  admiration.  At  any  rate,  an 
applause  so  bewildered  could  hardly  be  heard  across 
the  Atlantic  ;  and  it  is  almost  exasperating  to  find 
that  in  England,  for  instance,  where  so  many  feeble 
American  reputations  have  been  revived  only  to 
die,  there  are  few  critics  who  know  even  the  name 
of  the  woman  who  has  come  nearest  in  our  day  and 
tongue  to  the  genius  of  Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning, 
and  who  has  made  Christina  Rossetti  and  Jean 
Ingelow  appear  but  second-rate  celebrities. 

When  some  one  asked  Emerson  a  few  years 
since  whether  he  did  not  think  "  H.  H."  the  best 
woman-poet  on  this  continent,  he  answered  in  his 
meditative  way,  "  Perhaps  we  might  as  well  omit 
the  woman ; "  thus  placing  her,  at  least  in  that  mo- 
ment's impulse,  at  the  head  of  all.  He  used  to  cut 
her  poems  from  the  newspapers  as  they  appeared, 
to  carry  them  about  with  him,  and  to  read  them 
aloud.  His  especial  favorites  were  the  most  con- 
densed and  the  deepest,  those  having  something  of 
that  kind  of  obscurity  which  Coleridge  pronounced 
to  be  a  compliment  to  the  reader.  His  favorite 
among  them  all  is  or  was  the  sonnet  entitled 


42      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

"THOUGHT. 

"  O  Messenger,  art  thou  the  king,  or  I  ? 
Thou  dalliest  outside  the  palace-gate 
Till  on  thine  idle  armor  lie  the  late 
And  heavy  dews  :  the  morn's  bright,  scornful  eye 
Reminds  thee ;  then,  in  subtle  mockery, 
Thou  smilest  at  the  window  where  I  wait 
Who  bade  thee  ride  for  life.     In  empty  state 
My  days  go  on,  while  false  hours  prophesy 
Thy  quick  return ;  at  last  in  sad  despair 
I  cease  to  bid  thee,  leave  thee  free  as  air ; 
When  lo  !  thou  stand's!  before  me  glad  and  fleet, 
And  lay'st  undreamed-of  treasures  at  my  feet. 
Ah  !  messenger,  thy  royal  blood  to  buy, 
I  am  too  poor.     Thou  art  the  king,  not  I." l 

The  uncontrollableness  of  thought  by  will  has 
never  been  better  expressed  by  words  than  in  this 
sonnet ;  and  there  are  others  which  utter  emotion 
so  profoundly,  and  yet  with  such  artistic  quiet, 
that  each  brief  poem  seems  the  summary  of  a  life. 
Take  this,  for  instance,  describing  a  love  that,  hav- 
ing once  found  its  shore,  burns  its  ships  behind  it, 
and  absolutely  cuts  off  all  retreat :  — 

"BURNT   SHIPS. 

"  O  Love,  sweet  Love,  who  came  with  rosy  sail 
And  foaming  prow  across  the  misty  sea ! 
O  Love,  brave  Love,  whose  faith  was  full  and  free 
i  Verses  by  H.  H..  p.  121. 


HELEN   JACKSON.  43 

That  lands  of  sun  and  gold  which  could  not  fail 
Lay  in  the  west,  — that  blooiji  no  wintry  gale 
Could  blight,  and  eyes  whose  love  thine  own  should  be, 
Called  thee  with  steadfast  voice  of  prophecy 
To  shores  unknown  ! 

"  O  Love,  poor  Love,  avail 
Thee  nothing  now  thy  faiths,  thy  braveries  ; 
There  is  no  sun,  no  bloom ;  a  cold  wind  strips 
The  bitter  foam  from  off  the  wave  where  dips 
No  more  thy  prow  ;  the  eyes  are  hostile  eyes ; 
The  gold  is  hidden  ;  vain  thy  tears  and  cries  : 
O  Love,  poor  Love,  why  didst  thou  burn  thy  ships  ?  "* 

"  H.  H."  writes  another  class  of  poems,  that,  with 
a  grace  and  wealth  like  Andrew  Marvell's,  carry  us 
into  the  very  life  of  external  nature,  or  link  it  with 
the  heart  of  man.  Emerson's  "  Humblebee "  is 
not  a  creation  more  fresh  and  wholesome  than  is 

"MY    STRAWBERRY. 

"  O  marvel,  fruit  of  fruits,  I  pause 
To  reckon  thee.     I  ask  what  cause 
Set  free  so  much  of  red  from  heats 
At  core  of  earth,  and  mixed  such  sweets 
With  sour  and  spice;  what  was  that  strength 
Which  out  of  darkness,  length  by  length, 
Spun  all  thy  shining  thread  of  vine 
Netting  the  fields  in  bond  as  thine ; 
I  see  thy  tendrils  drink  by  sips 
From  grass  and  clover's  smiling  lips ; 
1  Verses,  p.  71. 


44      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

I  hear  thy  roots  dig  down  for  wells 
Tapping  the  meadow's  hidden  cells ; 
Whole  generations  of  green  things, 
Descended  from  long  lines  of  springs, 
I  see  make  room  for  thee  to  bide 
A  quiet  comrade  by  their  side  ; 
I  see  the  creeping  peoples  go 
Mysterious  journeys  to  and  fro ; 
Treading  to  right  and  left  of  thee, 
Doing  thee  homage  vvonderingly. 
I  see  the  wild  bees  as  they  fare 
Thy  cups  of  honey  drink,  but  spare ; 
I  mark  thee  bathe  and  bathe  again 
In  sweet  uncalendared  spring  rain. 
I  watch  how  all  May  has  of  sun 
Makes  haste  to  have  thy  ripeness  done, 
While  all  her  nights  let  dews  escape 
To  set  and  cool  thy  perfect  shape. 
Ah,  fruit  of  fruits,  no  more  I  pause 
To  dream  and  seek  thy  hidden  laws ! 
I  stretch  my  hand,  and  dare  to  taste 
In  instant  of  delicious  waste 
On  single  feast,  all  things  that  went 
To  make  the  empire  thou  hast  spent."  I 

As  the  most  artistic  among  her  verses  I  should 
class  the  "Gondolieds,"  in  which  all  Venice  seems 
reflected  in  the  movement  and  cadence,  while  the 
thought  is  fresh  and  new  and  strong.  Then  there 
are  poems  which  seem  to  hold  all  secrets  of  pas- 

>  Verses,  p.  166. 


HELEN   JACKSON.  45 

sion  trembling  on  the  lips,  yet  forbear  to  tell  them ; 
and  others,  on  a  larger  scale,  which  have  a  grander 
rhythmical  movement  than  most  of  our  poets  have 
dared  even  to  attempt.  Of  these  the  finest,  to  my 
ear,  is  "  Resurgam  ; "  but  I  remember  that  Char- 
lotte Cushman  preferred  the  "  Funeral  March,"  and 
loved  to  read  it  in  public.  Those  who  heard  her 
can  never  forget  the  solemnity  with  which  she  re- 
cited those  stately  cadences,  or  the  grandeur  of  her 
half-glance  over  the  shoulder  as  she  named  first 
among  the  hero's  -funeral  attendants 

"  Majestic  Death,  his  freedman,  following." 

"  H.  H."  reaches  the  popular  heart  best  in  a  class 
of  poems  easy  to  comprehend,  thoroughly  human 
in  sympathy ;  poems  of  love,  of  motherhood,  of 
bereavement ;  poems  such  as  are  repeated  and 
preserved  in  many  a  Western  cabin,  cheering  and 
strengthening  many  a  heart.  Other  women  have 
exerted  a  similar  power ;  but  in  the  hands  of  a 
writer  like  Alice  Gary,  for  instance,  the  influence 
is  shallow,  though  pure  and  wholesome ;  she 
sounds  no  depths  as  this  later  poet  sounds  them. 
The  highest  type  of  this  class  of  Helen  Jackson's 
verses  may  be  found  in  the  noble  poem  entitled 
"  Spinning,"  which  begins  :  -. — 


46      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

"  Like  a  blind  spinner  in  the  sun 

I  tread  my  days  ; 
I  know  that  all  the  threads  will  run 

Appointed  ways ; 

I  know  each  day  will  bring  its  task, 
And,  being  blind,  no  more  I  ask."  J 

No  finer  symbolic  picture  of  human  life  has  ever 
been  framed :  Henry  Vaughan,  had  he  been  a 
woman,  might  have  written  it. 

If,  in  addition  to  her  other  laurels,  Mrs.  Jackson 
is  the  main  author  of  the  "  Saxe  Holm  "  tales,  she 
must  be  credited  not  only  with  some  of  the  very 
best  stories  yet  written  in  America,  —  "  Draxy  Mil- 
ler's Dowry,"  for  instance,  —  but  with  one  of  the 
best-kept  of  all  literary  secrets.  There  has  been 
something  quite  dramatic  in  the  skill  with  which 
the  puzzle  has  been  kept  alive  by  the  appearance 
of  imaginary  claimants  —  if  imaginary  they  be  —  to 
the  honor  of  this  authorship :  now  a  maiden  lady 
in  the  interior  of  New  York  ;  now  a  modest  young 
girl  whose  only  voucher,  Celia  Burleigh,  died  with- 
out revealing  her  name.  I  do  not  know  whether 
any  of  these  claimants  took  the  pains  to  write  out 
whole  stories  in  manuscript,  —  as  an  Irish  pretend- 
er copied  out  whole  chapters  of  Miss  Edgeworth's 
"Castle  Rackrent,"  with  corrections  and  erasures, 

1  Verses,  p.  14. 


HELEN    JACKSON.  47 

—  but  it  is  well  known  that  the  editors  of  "  Scrib- 
ner's  Monthly  "  were  approached  by  some  one  who 
professed  to  have  dropped  the  "  Saxe  Holm  "  sto- 
ries in  the  street,  and  demanded  that  they  should 
be  restored  to  him.  He  was  suppressed  by  the 
simple  expedient  of  inviting  him  to  bring  in  some 
specimens  of  his  own  poetry,  that  it  might  be  com- 
pared with  that  of  "  Draxy  Miller ;  "  but  the  mod- 
est young  girls  and  the  apocryphal  rural  contribu- 
tors were  less  easily  abolished,  though  time  has 
abated  their  demands.  The  more  Mrs.  Jackson 
denied  the  authorship,  the  more  resolutely  the  pub- 
lic mind  intrenched  itself  in  the  belief  that  she  had 
something  to  do  with  the  stories,  and  that  at  least 
the  verses  therein  contained  were  hers  and  hers 
alone.  There  were  coincidences  of  personal  and 
local  details,  to  connect  her  with  the  veiled  author ; 
and  the  fantastic  title  of  one  tale,  "The  One- 
legged  Dancers,"  had  previously  appeared  in  her 
"  Bits  of  Travel." l  The  final  verdict  seemed  to  be 
that  she  must  have  written  the  books,  with  enough 
of  aid  from  some  friend  to  justify  her  persistent 
denial ;  and  ingenious  critics  soon  began  to  see 
internal  traces  of  a  double  authorship,  while  this 
to  other  critics  seemed  altogether  absurd. 

The  publication  of  "  Mercy  Philbrick's  Choice  " 

»  Bits  of  Travel,  p.  65. 


48      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

and  "  Hetty's  Strange  History  "  only  revived  the 
same  questions.  The  plots  of  these  books  showed 
the  hand  of  "  Saxe  Holm,"  the  occasional  verses 
that  of  "H.  H."  Both  novels  brought  a  certain  dis- 
'  appointment :  they  had  obvious  power,  but  were  too 
painful  to  be  heartily  enjoyed.  After  all,  the  public 
mind  is  rather  repelled  by  a  tragedy,  since  people 
wish  to  be  made  happy.  Great  injustice  has  been 
done  by  many  critics,  I  think,  to  "  Hetty's  Strange 
History."  While  its  extraordinary  power  is  con- 
ceded, it  has  been  called  morbid  and  immoral ;  yet 
it  is  as  stern  a  tale  of  retribution  as  "  Madame 
Bovary"  or  "The  Scarlet  Letter."  We  rarely  find 
Un  fiction  Iny  severity  of  injustice  meted  out  to  a 
I  wrong  act  done  from  noble  motives.  In  Jean 
Paul's  "Siebenkas"  the  husband  feigns  death  in 
order  that  his  wife  may  find  happiness  without  him  : 
he  succeeds  in  hit  effort,  and  is  at  last  made  happy 
himself.  In  "  Hetty's  Strange  History  "  the  wife 
effaces  herself  with  precisely  the  same  object,  —  for 
her  husband's  sake  :  but  the  effort  fails ;  the  hus- 
band is  not  made  happy  by  her  absence,  and  when 
they  are  re-united  the  memory  of  her  deception 
cannot  be  banished,  so  that  after  the  first  bliss  of 
re-union  they  find  that  complete  healing  can  never 
come.  Only  a  deep  nature  could  have  planned, 


HELEN    JACKSON.  49 

only  a  very  firm  pen  could  have  traced,  the  final 
punishment  of  Hetty's  sin. 

One  of  the  acutest  critics  in  America  said  of 
Saxe  Holm :  "  She  stands  on  the  threshold  of  the 
greatest  literary  triumphs  ever  won  by  an  Amer- 
ican woman."  It  must  be  owned  that  she  still  lin- 
gers there :  we  still  wait  for  any  complete  and 
unquestionable  victory.  Who  knows  but  that  versa- 
tile imagination  may  already  have  sought  some  other 
outlet,  and  she  may  already  be  mystifying  her  pub- 
lic under  some  new  name  ?  And  of  "  H.  H."  as  a 
poet  it  must  be  said  that  she  seems  of  late  to  be 
half  shrinking  from  her  full  career,  and  to  be  turn- 
ing rather  to  the  path  of  descriptive  prose.  She 
has  always  excelled  in  this :  her  "  German  Land- 
lady" is  unsurpassed  in  its  way,  and  her  new  expe- 
riences of  Western  residence  have  only  added  ful- 
ness and  finish  to  this  part  of  her  literary  work.  No 
one  has  ever  written  of  frontier-life  so  well  as  she, 
in  her  "  Bits  of  Travel  at  Home  ; "  with  such  hearty 
sympathy,  with  a  tone  so  discriminating,  and  with 
such  absence  of  the  merely  coarse  or  melodramatic. 
All  the  California  writers  have  not  secured  for  the 
life  of  that  region  such  a  place  in  the  world  of  art 
as  she  is  giving  to  Colorado ;  all  their  work,  how- 
ever brilliant,  is  encumbered  with  what  is  crude, 
cheap,  exaggerated,  and  therefore  temporary  ;  hers 


50      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

is  clear  and  firm  and  strong ;  and  those  who  regret 
her  absence  from  her  early  home  can  yet  rejoice 
that  she  dwells  amid  scenery  so  magnificent,  and 
in  so  absorbing  a  current  of  human  life. 


HENRY  JAMES,   JR.  51 


HENRY  JAMES,  JR. 

WE  are  growing  more  cosmopolitan  and 
varied,  in  these  United  States  of  America ; 
and  our  authors  are  gaining  much,  if  they  are  also 
losing  a  little,  in  .respect  to  training.  The  early 
career  of  an  American  author  used  to  be  tolerably 
fixed  and  clear,  if  limited ;  a  college  education, 
a  few  months  in  Europe,  a  few  years  in  some 
profession,  and  then  an  entrance  into  literature 
by  some  side-door.  In  later  times,  the  printing- 
office  has  sometimes  been  substituted  for  the  col- 
lege, and  has  given  a  new  phase  of  literary  char- 
acter distinct  from  the  other,  but  not  less  valuable. 
Mr.  Henry  James,  Jr.,  belongs  to  neither  of  the 
classes  thus  indicated :  he  may  be  said  to  have 
been  trained  in  literature  by  literature  itself,  so  early 
did  he  begin  writing,  and  so  incessantly  has  he  writ- 
ten. We  perhaps  miss  in  his  works  something  of 
the  method  which  the  narrower  classical  nurture 
was  supposed  to  give;  and  we  find  few  traces 
of  that  contact  with  the  mass  of  mankind  which 


52      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

comes  through  mere  daily  duty  to  the  professional 
man,  the  business  man,  the  journalist.  Mr.  James 
has  kept  a  little  too  good  company  :  we  do  not  find 
in  his  books  such  refreshing  types  of  hearty  and 
robust  manhood  as  Howells,  with  all  his  dainti- 
ness, finds  it  easy  to  depict  in  Colonel  Ellison  and 
the  skipper  of  the  Aroostook.  Then  Mr.  James's 
life  has  been  so  far  transatlantic,  that  one  hardly 
knows  whether  he  would  wish  to  be  accounted  an 
American  writer,  after  all ;  so  that  his  education, 
his  point  of  view,  his  methods,  all  unite  to  place 
him  in  a  class  by  himself. 

It  is  pleasant  to  see  a  man  write,  as  he  has 
always  done,  with  abundant  energy,  and  seemingly 
from  the  mere  love  of  writing.  Yet  it  is  im- 
possible to  deny  that  he  has  suffered  from  this 
very  profusion.  Much  of  his  early  work  seems  a 
sort  of  self-training,  gained  at  the  expense  of  his 
readers ;  each  sheet,  each  story,  has  been  hurried 
into  print  before  the  ink  was  dry,  in  order  to  test 
it  on  the  public,  —  a  method  singularly  removed 
from  the  long  and  lonely  maturing  of  Hawthorne. 
"  Eoisivete  est  necessaire  aux  esprifs,  aussi  bien 
que  le  travail"  Even  the  later  books  of  Mr. 
James,  especially  his  travels  and  his  essays,  show 
something  of  this  defect.  What  a  quarry  of  admira- 
ble suggestions  is,  for  instance,  his  essay  on  Balzac ; 


HENRY  JAMES,   JR.  53 

but  how  prolix  it  is,  what  repetitions,  what  a  want 
of  condensation  and  method  !  The  same  is  true, 
in  a  degree,  of  his  papers  on  George  Sand  and 
Targe" nieff,  while  other  chapters  in  his  "French 
Poets  and  Novelists "  are  scarcely  more  than 
sketches  :  the  paper  on  the  Theatre  Fran^ais 
hardly  mentions  Sarah  Bernhardt;  and,  indeed, 
that  on  Turg£nieff  says  nothing  of  his  masterpiece, 
"Terres  Vierges."  Through  all  these  essays  he 
shows  delicacy,  epigram,  quickness  of  touch,  pene- 
tration ;  but  he  lacks  symmetry  of  structure,  and 
steadiness  of  hand. 

We  can  trace  in  the  same  book,  also,  some  of 
the  author's  limitations  as  an  imaginative  artist, 
since  in  criticising  others  a  man  shows  what  is 
wanting  in  himself.  When  he  says,  for  instance, 
that  a  monarchical  society  is  "more  available  for 
the  novelist  than  any  other,"  he  shows  that  he  does 
not  quite  appreciate  the  strong  point  of  republi- 
canism, in  that  it  develops  real  individuality  in  pro- 
portion as  it  diminishes  conventional  distinctions. 
The  truth  is,  that  the  modern  novel  has  risen  with 
the  advance  of  democratic  society,  on  the  ruins  of 
feudalism.  Another  defect  is  seen  from  time  to 
time,  when,  in  criticising  some  well-known  book, 
he  misses  its  special  points  of  excellence.  Take, 
for  instance,  his  remarks  on  that  masterly  and 


54      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

repulsive  novel,  "Madame  Bovary."  To  say  of  the 
author  of  that  work  that  his  "  theory  as  a  novelist, 
briefly  expressed,  is  to  begin  at  the  outside,"1 
seems  almost  whimsically  unjust.  There  is  not  a 
character  in  modern  fiction  developed  more  essen- 
tially from  within  than  that  of  this  heroine  :  all  her 
sins  and  sorrows  are  virtually  predicted  in  the  early 
chapters ;  even  Mr.  James  has  to  admit  that  it 
"  could  not  have  been  otherwise " 2  with  her, 
thereby  taking  back  his  own  general  assertion. 
Then  he  says  "every  thing  in  the  book  is  ugly,"3 
whereas  one  of  its  salient  points  is  the  beauty  of 
the  natural  descriptions  in  which  its  most  painful 
incidents  are  framed.  Finally,  —  and  this  is  the 
most  puzzling  misconception  of  all,  —  Mr.  James 
utterly  fails  to  see  the  bearing  of  one  of  the  pivotal 
points  of  the  narrative,  an  unfortunate  surgical 
operation  performed  by  the  heroine's  husband,  a 
country  doctor  :  he  calls  it  an  "  artistic  bravado,"  8 
and  treats  it  as  a  mere  episode  of  doubtful  value, 
whereas  it  is  absolutely  essential  to  the  working-out 
of  the  plot.  The  situation  is  this  :  Madame  Bovary 
is  being  crushed  to  the  earth  by  living  in  a  social 
vacuum,  with  a  stupid  husband  whom  she  despises, 
and  has  already  deceived.  She  has  just  felt  a 

1  French  Poets  and  Novelists,  p.  256.  *  Ibid.,  p.  a6i. 

»  Ibid.,  p.  265. 


HENRY   JAMES,    JR.  55 

twinge  of  remorse,  after  receiving  an  affectionate 
letter  from  her  father ;  when  suddenly  this  com- 
monplace husband  is  presented  to  her  eyes  in  a 
wholly  new  light,  —  that  of  an  unappreciated  man  of 
genius,  who  has  by  a  single  act  won  a  place  among 
the  great  surgeons  of  his  time.  All  that  is  left 
undepraved  in  her  nature  is  touched  and  roused  by 
this  :  she  will  do  any  thing,  bear  any  thing,  for 
such  a  husband.  The  illusion  lasts  but  a  few  days, 
and  is  pitilessly  torn  away  :  the  husband  proves  a 
mere  vulgar,  ignorant  quack,  even  duller,  emptier, 
more  hopeless,  than  she  had  dreamed.  The  re- 
action takes  her  instantly  downward,  and  with  that 
impulse  she  sinks  to  rise  no  more.  The  author 
himself  (Flaubert)  takes  the  pains  to  warn  us  dis- 
tinctly beforehand  of  the  bearing  of  this  inci- 
dent ; l  but  his  precaution  seems  needless,  the  thing 
explains  itself.  It  is  one  of  the  strongest  and 
clearest  passages  in  the  whole  tragedy,  and  it  seems 
as  if  there  must  be  some  defect  of  artistic  sensibility 
in  any  critic  who  misses  his  way  here.  Or  else  — 
which  is  more  probable  —  it  is  another  instance  of 
that  haste  in  literary  workmanship  which  is  one 
of  Mr.  James's  besetting  sins. 


1  "  Elle  demeurait  fort  embarrassee  dans  sa  velUiti  de  sacrz/tcf, 
quand  Vapothecaire  vint  a  propos  lui  fournir  une  occasion."  — 
MADAME  BOVARY,  p.  aio. 


$6      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

It  may  be  one  result  of  this  extreme  rapidity  of 
production,  that  Mr.  James  uses  certain  catch-words 
so  often  as  to  furnish  almost  a  shibboleth  for  his 
style  ;  such  words,  for  instance,  as  "  brutal,"  "  puer- 
ile," "  immense."  Another  result  is  seen  in  his  in- 
difference to  careful  local  coloring,  especially  where 
the  scene  is  laid  in  the  United  States.  When  he 
draws  Americans  in  Europe,  he  is  at  home ;  when 
he  brings  Europeans  across  the  Atlantic,  he  never 
seems  quite  sure  of  his  ground,  except  in  Newport, 
which  is  in  some  respects  the  least  American  spot 
on  this  continent.  He  opens  his  "  Europeans  "  by 
exhibiting  horse-cars  in  the  streets  of  Boston  nearly 
ten  years  before  their  introduction,  and  his  whole 
sketch  of  the  Wentworth  family  gives  a  sense  of 
vagueness.  It  is  not  difficult  to  catch  a  few  unmis- 
takable points,  and  portray  a  respectable  elderly 
gentleman  reading  "  The  Daily  Advertiser ;  "  but 
all  beyond  this  is  indefinite,  and,  when  otherwise, 
sometimes  gives  quite  an  incorrect  impression  of 
the  place  and  period  described.  The  family  por- 
trayed has  access  to  "  the  best  society  in  Boston  ; " 
yet  the  daughter,  twenty-three  years  old,  has  "  never 
seen  an  artist,"  though  the  picturesque  figure  of 
Allston  had  but  lately  disappeared  from  the  streets, 
at  the  time  mentioned,  and  Cheney,  Staigg,  and 
Eastman  Johnson  might  be  seen  there  any  day,  with 


HENRY   JAMES,   JR.  57 

plenty  of  other  artists  less  known.  The  household 
is  perfectly  amazed  and  overwhelmed  at  the  sight  of 
two  foreigners,  although  there  probably  were  more 
cultivated  Europeans  in  Boston  thirty  years  ago  than 
now,  having  been  drawn  thither  by-  the  personal 
celebrity  or  popularity  of  Agassiz,  Ticknor,  Longfel- 
low, Sumner,  and  Dr.  Howe.  The  whole  picture  — 
though  it  is  fair  to  remember  that  the  author  calls  it 
a  sketch  only  —  seems  more  like  a  delineation  of 
American  society  by  Fortunio  or  Alexandre  Dumas 
fits,  than  like  a  portraiture  by  one  to  the  manor  born. 
The  truth  is,  that  Mr.  James's  cosmopolitanism  is, 
after  all,  limited  :  to  be  really  cosmopolitan,  a  man 
must  be  at  home  even  in  his  own  country. 

There  are  no  short  stories  in  our  recent  litera- 
ture, I  think,  which  are  so  good  as  Mr.  James's 
best,  —  "  Madame  de  Mauves,"  for  instance,  and 
"  The  Madonna  of  the  Future."  Even  these  some- 
times lack  condensation ;  but  they  have  a  thor- 
oughly original  grasp,  and  fine  delineations  of  char- 
acter. It  is  a  great  step  downward  from  these  to 
the  somewhat  vulgar  horrors  contained  in  "A 
Romance  of  Certain  Old  Clothes."  The  author 
sometimes  puts  on  a  cynicism  which  does  not  go 
very  deep  ;  and  the  young  lovers  of  his  earlier  tales 
had  a  disagreeable  habit  of  swearing  at  young 
ladies,  and  ordering  them  about.  Yet  he  has  kept 


58      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

himself  very  clear  from  the  disagreeable  qualities  of 
the  French  fiction  he  loves.  His  books  never 
actually  leave  a  bad  taste  in  one's  mouth,  as  Char- 
lotte Bronte  said  of  French  novels  ;  and,  indeed,  no 
one  has  touched  with  more  delicate  precision  the 
vexed  question  of  morality  in  art.  He  finely  calls 
the  longing  after  a  moral  ideal  "  this  southern  slope 
of  the  mind," l  and  says  of  the  ethical  element, 
"  It  is  in  reality  simply  a  part  of  the  richness  of 
inspiration :  it  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  artistic 
process,  and  it  has  every  thing  to  do  with  the  artis- 
tic effect."  2  This  is  admirable  ;  and  it  is  a  vindica- 
tion of  this  attribute  when  we  find  that  Mr.  James's 
imost  successful  social  stories,  "An  International 
Episode,"  and  "  Daisy  Miller,"  have  been  written 
with  distinct  purpose,  and  convey  lessons.  He 
has  achieved  no  greater  triumph  than  when,  in  this 
last-named  book,  he  succeeds  in  holding  our  sym- 
pathy and  even  affection,  after  all,  for  the  essential 
innocence  and  rectitude  of  the  poor  wayward  girl 
whose  follies  he  has  so  mercilessly  portrayed. 

It  cannot  be  said  that  Mr.  James  has  yet  suc- 
ceeded in  producing  a  satisfactory  novel :  as  a 
clever  woman  has  said,  he  should  employ  some  one 
else  to  write  the  last  few  pages.  However  strong 
the  characterizations,  however  skilful  the  plot,  the 

1  French  Poets  and  Novelists,  p.  114.  *  Ibid.,  p.  82. 


HENRY   JAMES,   JR.  59 

reader  is  left  discontented.  If  in  this  respect  he 
seems  behind  Howells,  it  must  be  remembered  that 
James  habitually  deals  with  profounder  emotions, 
and  is  hence  more  liable  to  be  overmastered. 
Longfellow  says  to  himself  in  his  "  Hyperion,"  "  O 
thou  poor  authorling  !  Reach  a  little  deeper  into 
the  human  heart !  Touch  those  strings,  touch 
those  deeper  strings  more  boldly,  or  the  notes  shall 
die  away  like  whispers,  and  no  ear  shall  hear  them 
save  thine  own."  It  is  James  rather  than  Howells 
who  has  heeded  this  counsel.  The  very  disap- 
pointment which  the  world  felt  at  the  close  of 
"  The  American  "  was  in  some  sense  a  tribute  to 
its  power :  the  author  had  called  up  characters  and 
situations  which  could  not  be  cramped,  at  last, 
within  the  conventional  limits  of  a  stage-ending. 
As  a  piece  of  character-drawing,  the  final  irresolu- 
tion of  the  hero  was  simply  perfect :  it  seemed  one 
of  the  cases  where  a  romancer  conjures  up  persons 
who  are  actually  alive,  and  who  insist  on  working 
out  a  destiny  of  their  own,  irrespective  of  his 
wishes.  To  be  thus  conquered  by  one's  own  crea- 
tion might  seem  one  of  those  defeats  that  are 
greater  than  victories ;  yet  it  is  the  business  of  the 
novelist,  after  all,  to  keep  his  visionary  people  well  in 
hand,  and  to  contrive  that  they  shall  have  their  own 
way,  and  yet  not  spoil  his  climax.  In  life,  as  in  "  The 


60      SHORT  STUDIES  OF  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 

American,"  the  most  complicated  situations  often 
settle  themselves  by  events  unseen,  and  the  most 
promising  tragedies  are  cheated  of  their  crisis.  But 
it  is  not  enough  that  literary  art  should  give  a  true 
transcript  of  nature ;  for  the  work  must  also  com- 
ply with  the  laws  of  art,  and  must  have  a  beginning, 
a  middle,  and  an  end.  "  Un  ouvrage  d'art  doit 
&trc  un  etrc,  et  non  une  chose  arbitraire" l 

1  Pens^es  de  J.  Joubcrt,  p.  289. 


THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  SANTA  CRUZ 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  DATE  stamped  below. 


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